The range of upstream-related data currently available to developers and
tool authors is currently limited to DESCRIPTION and HOMEPAGE in
ebuilds.

There have been several attempts at creating tools that check a
package's versions against Freshmeat to see whether an ebuild version
bump is required. Currently identifying a package's Freshmeat entry is a
matter of guesswork, and not something that can reliably be automated.

Similarly, various scripts exist to check a package's status against a
specialist external data source. One of the authors, for example, has a
shell script hack that tries to determine whether any app-vim
packages need bumping by checking the associated vim.org script
page. Again, tying packages to external data source entries is not
particulaly straight forward.

Making additional upstream-related data easily available will have other
benefits:

It will allow systems such as the Packages website to provide more
useful information to end users.

It will reduce the time spent by developers trying to find how to
contact upstream.

It will give treecleaners additional information to decide whether
a package can be removed from the tree.

metadata.dtd should allow the use of a upstream tag in
metadata.xml. Inside the upstream tag, developers should be able to
add upstream related information.

This GLEP defines the following five tags for upstream:
maintainer, changelog, bugs-to, remote-id and doc none of
which are mandatory. Future GLEPs may extend this -- tools processing
metadata.xml should ignore unrecognized elements.

maintainer can contain the tags name and email, indicating
the person or organization responsible for upstream maintainership of
the package. The tag may appear more than once.

The maintainer element has a status attribute, which is one of
active or inactive. This attribute is not mandatory. The absence of it
shall be interpreted as unknown.

The maintainer element can be the same as the top-level maintainer
element in cases where a developer decides to maintain the package in
addition to/instead of the original upstream. In such cases a maintainer
entry for the original upstream should be present.

name should contain a block of text with upstream's name, is mandatory
and can only appear once.

email should contain an e-mail address in the format foo@bar.bar.

changelog should contain a URL prefixed with http:// or
https:// where the location of the upstream changelog can be found.

doc should contain a URL prefixed with with http:// or
https:// where the location of the upstream documentation can be found.
The link must not point to any third party documentation and must be version
independent. If the documentation is available in more than one language, a
lang attribute can be used which follows the same rules as the one
for longdescription.

bugs-to should contain a place where bugs can be filed, a URL
prefixed with http:// or https:// or an e-mail address prefixed
with mailto:.

remote-id should specify a type of package identification tracker
and the identification that corresponds to the package in question.
remote-id should make it easier to index information such as its
Freshmeat ID or its CPAN name.

The remote-id element has a type attribute, which is a string
identifying the type of upstream source. Examples are freshmeat, in
which case the element content should be the Freshmeat ID or vim, in
which case the element content should be the vim.org script
identifier. This GLEP does not specify a complete list of legal values
for type -- developers should email the gentoo-dev mailing list
before using a new type value. The list of valid tags should be kept
in metadata/dtd/remote-id-tags.dtd.

No changes are necessary to existing metadata.xml files. Information
in the new tags is not mandatory. Tools that currently read
metadata.xml files may break if written poorly; well written tools
should just ignore the additional elements.